News

14 August 2018

Virtual Reef at Science Week 2018

We are delighted to see one of our important environmental projects become this year’s ABC Science Week national project. The Monitoring Through Many Eyes projects began in 2015 with FrontierSI partners Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mining and Energy, as well as ACEMS (the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. The project uses citizen science to understand and monitor the Great Barrier Reef.

And now, for National Science Week and the International Year of the Reef, the ABC brought their forces to join the team and have invited every Australian to dive through their computer screens into the Reef by taking part in Virtual Reef Diver — the ABC’s online citizen science project.

Dr Erin Peterson, spatial scientist and project leader from Queensland University of Technology said we need community to pitch in to help us classify thousands of underwater images of the Reef.

“To do this, we have developed a spatial data mapping and modelling platform, which can be used to ingest new spatial data describing coral cover, fit spatial models to those data, and generate maps of coral cover with associated uncertainty estimates throughout the whole of the Great Barrier Reef,” Erin said.